Chapter Thirteen: His Butterfly

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– Zach –

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– Zach –

The library is a lot more deserted on Fridays. There are not more than ten students present, which means more thinking space and less not-so-quiet whispers. I can live with that.

Scanning through the much dreaded assignment brief, I flip to the next blank page on my sketchbook and begin drawing faintly the outline of various shapes. Animal typography; sounds simple, but I know now that it is far from it. If I can fill up the silhouettes with a range of different fonts, or perhaps even just one, maybe that would be good enough for a head start.

I spend the next thirty minutes devoted to practising different handwriting and bold letters while looking up references on Google. Perhaps it would be an even better idea to draw an animal entirely from fonts. I can try that.

My thoughts are interrupted the second James greets me, loudly. It appears that the general rules don't apply to some people, not when you're a favorite of society.

"Hey man, how are things?" he smiles and takes the seat opposite me.

"Nothing special." I say, putting my pen down.

"Alright, so we're here to discuss about our assignment, right?" he asks, stating the obvious. "I'm ready."

"Good." I nod. "Any ideas?"

"A few." He gestures and pulls a few pieces of what appears to be draft paper from his folder. He sets them neatly in front of me and starts explaining. "This one right here, is the rough idea of how things could turn out if we use squiggly fonts, you know, so they are more flexible and you can manipulate them into whatever shape you want. For our case, it'll be any animal."

I listen as he continues.

"Alright, then this other one right here, I was thinking, maybe instead of trying to fit or turn fonts into animals, we could turn animals into fonts instead." James suggest with confidence.

"Okay." I say. "We could probably improvise from there. What if we turned animals into their respective letters, and put them together to form another animal?"

"That's brilliant too!" his face lights up. "Oh that's kind of cool actually, it'll be like...animal-ception."

"Whatever you'd like to call it, I guess." I shrug and lay out a few of my ideas for him.

Contradictory to what I half-expected, the discussion is rather productive. Terra is right, this kid is excellent at what he does, but I have a feeling she wouldn't want to hear me say that, neither does Luke. But would she really?

I maintain a straight face while my mind wanders off on its own. I subtly study the style of his hair, imagining the possibilities of how it would turn out if it was slicked back. Would it have ring a bell if he is wearing a smart attire too?

I blink and look away. It is likely that I'm just overthinking it and am getting way ahead of myself. There are plenty of guys in this city with jet-black hair, and most of them surely can pull-off a slick hairstyle. Heck, it really isn't that rare to see a man dressed in a nice collared shirt pass midnight by a bar, too.

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